Picking Splinters by Mike Hume

Loophole Just a Beginning

I’ll be the first to admit when I’m wrong.

Last week I wrote how the Major League Baseball steroid hearing on Capitol Hill was a frivolous use of power and that nothing would come of it save dragging the athletes through the mud and some badly-craved publicity for the politicians presiding over the hearings. I was wrong. In addition to the badly-craved publicity and the utter fall of former hero Mark McGwire, one thing came from the hearing. Congress successfully forced baseball to close a glaring loophole in their drug policy. But that one small issue still did not justify the hearing.

I was surprised by the revelation that the new drug testing policy featured a prominent loophole that allowed a player to pay a fine, rather than be subjected to a mandatory suspension. It’s pathetic, though not entirely unsurprising, that Commissioner Bud Selig, Donald Fehr and their cronies would slip such language into the revision. They could have done it for any number of reasons: to protect the image of their players, to protect the image of the sport and thereby prevent losses at the gate, or simply because the players union remains the most obstinate and omnipotent collective bargaining body on the planet and Selig couldn’t get anything more out of them. Whatever the reason, none is acceptable.

Steroids are against the law. Period. Asking athletes to pay a pittance of their multi-million dollar salaries, in exchange for the continued opportunity to further enhance their uber-contracts is about as effective as trying to hit a Randy Johnson fastball with a toothpick made of balsa wood.

I have no sympathy for baseball, or its players that have used illegal substances in the past. This mess is of their own making. Had they come clean on their own accord earlier, with sincere efforts to fix the problem, none of this would have happened. As it is, Selig had to watch as the entire 1998 home run chase between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa became forever cloaked in doubt due to McGwire’s repeated dodging of the questions.

That said, I still do not think that the hearing was a necessity; rather, it was completely useless. The Washington Post’s Sally Jenkins maintains that critics of the hearing were wrong because a week after the testimonies, the press is still talking about it.

Speaking as someone who watches CNN for 12-16 hours straight in a newsroom, I can safely say that the media continuing to discuss a story does not justify its coverage. I can recall one week when every show on the CNN lineup featured the escape and subsequent death of a tiger belonging to a former Tarzan actor. From Wolf Blitzer, to Judy Woodruff (I’m still trying to figure out what the tiger has to do with the Washington political scene) right on up to Larry King, who featured the actor in an interview, all of them hounded this story. Does that mean that the death of this tiger is of monumental importance? Does it justify any of the actions taken during the hunt for the escaped animal? No.

Justification and media coverage are two entirely different things.

In my mind, the only justification that Congress could have for these hearings is to aggressively root out the problem, not only in the Major Leagues, but in colleges and high schools around the country. Even after the removal of the fines-for-suspensions clause, the penalties are far too weak for a player caught cheating at the game.
Pete Rose broke the rules and he’s gone for life, and his transgression wasn’t even life-threatening, until he ran up a tab with Tony Soprano anyway. But you can still break the rules, check that, break the law, four times before being expelled from the game. How is that fair?

Jason Blair cheated at the rules of his profession, making up stories as a reporter for the New York Times. He was fired. Ditto Stephen Glass.

Cheat in baseball and you get an unpaid 10-day vacation for your first offense.
The players say that users will stop simply because they don’t want their names dragged into the mud. Well if shame is what they’re worried about, and they’d do anything to avoid a 10-day suspension because of the shame, they probably won’t mind Selig upping
the penalty for first-time users to “Banned for Life.”

In my mind, cheating invalidates all of a player’s accomplishments. As of last Thursday, Roger Maris regained his home run record. We can’t know when these guys started on the juice, and we can’t know when they cleaned up. Selig doesn’t want to put an asterisk next to any records during the period that resurrected the game from the post-1994 strike, but why should a cheater’s accomplishments carry the same weight as a guy like Hank Aaron or Maris? To me, the answer is simple. You cheat with an illegal substance, you’re gone. That ought to root out the problem really fast.

At the end of the day, Selig and the rest involved in Major League Baseball seem to forget that steroids are an illegal substance. No one gets killed by a spitball, or a piece of sandpaper. No one sustains crippling chronic degenerative injuries from a corked bat. There’s no black market for Crisco or Vaseline or whatever else pitchers have slathered on their breaking balls over the years.

The problem needs to stop, and it will only be truly addressed once baseball, or Congress, gets very serious and prepares itself for drastic measures that will change not only the future of the game, but its history as well. Until then, the testimonies did nothing but close a solitary loophole in a Swiss-cheese drug policy. Keep plugging boys.

Mike Hume may be emailed here.